*walks into an empty room, bare floors, blank walls, a janky piece of plywood held up on two sawhorses pretending to be a bar, and a creaky lonely chair in the middle of the room*

Sigh

*heads to the chair & sits down*

This, my friends, is the sorry tale of how, while battling the hordes of spammers, I killed a popular thread. Oh, I assure you, it wasn't done out of malice, but, bleary-eyed and dust-encrusted, I returned home to find our beloved board buried under an assault of spammers. I was tired, I was hungry, I was stupid. Emphasis on stupid. I decided to start fighting when I should have waited until I was rested, but I was the first mod back & the board was unusable.

*looks around the emptiness*

I made some coffee and entered the battle Sunday night, knowing that I could only remove posts but not block the spammers, but determined to try to get some breathing room. I started hacking and whacking, chipping away post by post for over an hour, and when I realized quite a lot of them were complete spammer topics I knew I could take out 20 or 30 at a time, instead of one by one. I attacked, I was knocking out the bastards by the handful...

and then I fucked up royally.

It was a wall of spam posts in "Open Topics", a long row, some marked as spam, some not. I was checking the boxes & trying to make sure I was only getting "zero follow-up post" while comparing the last post to known spammers when I checked the Bar 3, since the last post was a spammer, and somehow between cross-eyed & stupid I didn't notice the thousands of posts, and I didn't even realize I'd checked it until after I said "yes", delete topics...

I screamed loud enough my upstairs neighbor called to make sure I was okay.

It's unrecoverable. Gone. I've checked, but there's no way to recover a single thread.

I even checked the "wayback machine" to see if I could find any of it. It doesn't look like it's there either.

I am unbelievably sorry, and was so frozen by what I'd done it took me until Tuesday to even start going after the spam again - I seriously didn't want to fuck up more. I made it through over 8 hours of spam-whacking fine the last two days, so there's that at least.

Hopefully this empty space will get some love, and some of the memories created in Bar #3 can live on.

*sets up a round of drinks on the saw-horse bar, waits*

It's a camping trip in the desert, not the redemption of the fallen world - Cryptofishist

Eric, it's time to look forward. Things happen and in the scope of the world, this was not major. No over died over it my friend.
I love the new bar and would like to order up an ice cold traditional martini please.

And lest we forget what the Bar, in any of its incarnations, is about - here's what started it all:

The Bar

Postby tisha2 » Sat Sep 25, 2004 9:34 pm
Well kids,

I was just appreciating how much this here Eplaya
is like the real playa with the witty conversation, and the
mayhem, and the diverse opinions; being able to jump from one
camp (thread) to another...just realized that besides
the dust, there was something missing....hey! Where's my
fucking drink?!

SO - I take my needs into my own hands...

Welcome to the Eplaya Bar! Tish the Dish, the Hostess with the
Mostess at your service! She is plenty experienced (you heard me)
and pretty darn hot to boot. Step right up, pull up a barstool
and have a seat. The bar is fully stocked and lookee there!
A hundred kegs with every beer you've ever wanted on tap!

Act appropriately (as defined by you of course) and no puking!

What'll it be, baby?

"I have gobs of mustard and ketchup on the front of my shirt, which does not make me a hot dog." Sam A. McKeen